Season 31 | 2024

Saturday | 9 March 2024 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

Sunday | 10 March 2024 | 4:00pm

Christ Episcopal Church

310 North K Street | Tacoma 

For the first concert of its 31st season, The Esoterics welcomed the Yale Glee Club to the Pacific Northwest. With concerts in both Seattle and Tacoma, the choruses will each sing a set of their own music, and then combine forces, forming an ensemble of more than 100 voices!  This concert is especially meaningful for The Esoterics’ founding director Eric Banks; not only did he sing in YGC when he was in college, but he also served as the group’s assistant conductor in his senior year. Eric time in YGC inspired him to move to Seattle after his Yale graduation to study choral conducting at the University of Washington.

Eric has maintained a close tie over the years with YGC and its current director, Jeffrey Douma. This relationship has resulted in Eric’s creation of two different choral works for the ensemble, including a setting of Constantine Cavafy, with the title Voices. Eric composed this piece in 2008, in memory of his professor and mentor Fenno Heath, who served as the conductor of YGC for over 50 years. Voices will be sung by the combined choruses of The Esoterics and the Yale Glee Club at the end of the concert.

In the first half of this concert, The Esoterics will present six choral pieces by Yale composers:

And the swallow (2017) by Caroline Shaw

Despertar (2021) by Karen Siegel

If we have wisdom (2021) by Rex Isenberg

November prayer (2007, from Messages to myself) by Chris Theofanidis

Returning (2014, from The wheel of time, the dance) by Aaron Jay Kernis

Tuttarana (2014) by Reena Esmail

Some of you might recognize Rex Isenberg’s name from our VILLAINS and HEROES concert last spring, Chris Theofanidis and Aaron Kernis from our INTIMAS recording, Karen Siegel from winning our POLYPHONOS competition, Reena Esmail from pieces in our 2019 concert VULNERABILITY, or Caroline Shaw from her Pulitzer Prize.

In the second half of the concert, the Yale Glee Club performed a selection of their tour pieces, including works by André Thomas, Ismael Huerta, Nilo Alcala, Randall Thompson, Shireen Abu-Khader, as well as a world-premiere commission by Shruthi Rajarsekar, as well as a few traditional “college songs,”  including the Yale alma mater, Bright college years.

As promised, the concert came to a close with the combined choir of 100 voices, performing two works: If I were a swan (2012) by Kevin Puts, and Voices (2008) by Eric Banks.

For those who are curious about the title of the concert, “light and truth” is a translation of the motto of Yale University: “lux et veritas.” The Esoterics were truly honored to host one of the most celebrated undergraduate choruses in the world!

Saturday | 18 May 2024 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

Sunday | 19 May 2024 | 8:00pm

Plymouth United Church of Christ

1217 6th Avenue | Seattle

In this very special concert series, The Esoterics presented a concert of works that explored the intersection of the communal and the divine - the pleasure and power that we experience when we gather together, as well the comfort and beauty that we find in the natural world. This program featured four recent compositions by our founding director, Eric Banks, each written for choruses outside of Seattle. These works set texts in French, Italian, Tlingit, and English.

Cul sec! (2022) by Eric Banks

Try to understand (2019) by Eric Banks

Hold (2016) by Eric Banks

To have been there before (2018) by Eric Banks

We started the concert with Cul sec! – a piece originally commissioned by Choeur Mikrokosmos, one of the most accomplished choral ensembles in France, directed by Loïc Pierre. Cul sec! sets Six banquets, a set of six poems in different meters composed by Jean-François Pierre, the brother of the director. In Pierre’s poems, we are invited to partake in a lavish, raucous, delicious, and slightly ridiculous French party. The 24 singers of The Esoterics are divided into 3 choirs of 8 singers each that take on the musical roles of harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic ensembles, and are accompanied by a pitched percussion battery of marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, and crotales. Cul sec! celebrates human connection, the euphoria one experiences when partaking in delicious food, copious wine, and lively conversation with beautiful people, as well as the subsequent repercussions and regrets one has after waking up with a hangover the next morning.

The Esoterics emerged from this hangover with the sobering Try to understand – a piece that was originally composed in 2018 for St Jakob’s Chamber Choir, directed by Gary Graden. in Stockholm, Sweden. This work sets a text from Umberto Eco’s novel, Baudolino, and was premiered at a festival in Eco’s hometown near Milan, Italy. In Eco’s tale, Baudolino encounters Hypatia, the ancient Alexandrian philosopher and mythical queen of the Amazons, in a remote Georgian forest. As the two fall in love and share their views on the various mysteries of life, Hypatia (who is contrasted with the Catholicism of Baudolino), describes God, “the unique one,” through phrases that express what God is not, claiming that the human mind is not capable of understanding God: “…God embraces all but is nothing; because whatever you say about it, you will never fully convey God: …a lamp without flame, a flame without fire, a fire without heat, a somber light.” Try to understand was sung by a double chorus in Eco’s Italian as well as William Weaver’s English translation, accompanied by a 12-part string orchestra, including the members of the Skyros String Quartet.

Commissioned by Jeffrey Douma for the 155th anniversary of the Yale Glee Club and the Yale Alumni Chorus in New Haven, Hold sets a poem about singing through the various stages of life by the Twin Cities poet Anna George Meek. Hold is not only a celebration of the healing properties of gathering to sing together, it is a meditation on the chorus as a symbol of a utopian society, in which the members support each other. The central idea of Meek’s poem focuses on choral or “staggered” breathing, a choral technique during which one singer breathes while others carry the music forward.  Banks and Meek sang together in the Yale Glee Club as undergraduates and crafted this poem and piece together to honor their college choir, as well as to honor communities all over the world that hold space for each other to carry out a shared purpose and bring beauty forth. This triple chorus work was accompanied by pianist Kevin Johnson.

The final and largest work of this program, To have been there before, was commissioned by the Anchorage Concert Chorus and its director Grant Cochran. This work recites texts found in Travels in Alaska by the American naturalist John Muir, and was composed for antiphonal triple-chorus, string orchestra, pitched percussion, and piano. In eleven movements and over the course of 40 minutes, this work recounts Muir’s four trips to the Alexander Archipelago and Glacier Bay region of Southeastern Alaska, and include images of glaciers, islands, lakes, old-growth forests, moraines, fields of wildflowers, ice floes, the never-darkening sky in summer, as well as the unforgettable aurora borealis.  As one section of the chorus intones Muir’s description of the Alaskan wilderness, the other sections sing of the same natural phenomena in Tlingit, the language of the indigenous people that guided and protected Muir, making it possible for him to chronicle his journeys for us to enjoy today. These Tlingit words and singers create an “environment” within which we can gather together, commune with nature, revere its pristine state as well as its ability to renew itself, and find healing across time, culture, and language. The premiere of To have been there before was accompanied by a new film featuring the nature of this region by Kevin Mayes. Kevin is a San Francisco filmmaker and college friend of Eric’s, with whom Eric traveled through the Alexander Archipelago and Southeastern Alaska last spring.